Wait, Electricity Isn't Harmful To Health?

Sometimes, the list of things to be paranoid about feels endless: BPA in your water bottles, pesticides on your food, prescription drugs in your drinking water, and nanotechnology in your donuts. Luckily, most of these things will not statistically be responsible for your ultimate demise (you can likely credit heart disease and cancer for that). As Robert Sapolsky points out in his hilariously named Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, we have too much time on our hands, and as such, we tend to fill it with worrying about who (or what) is out to get us. But we are so consumed by the threat du jour that we rarely give any thought retrospectively to what was worth worrying about and what was pure phobia. I recently stumbled across this delightful (nyuk, nyuk) reminder:

Can you read the fine print? It says:

The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.

Noted.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Kalliopi Monoyios

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.